19 April 2018 10:22 AM

***This post from 2006 may help explain the curious warfare now going on in the Labour Party, which is actually between two kinds of Leftists, not between right and left. The Blairite takeover of the Tory Party, who are therefore the close allies of one of these factions, makes it very difficult for outsiders to understand. Here is the key:

The trouble with free, generally happy countries is that normal people just aren't interested in politics. They know as much about parties and their leaders as I know about football, soap operas or rock music - that is to say they have a vague idea of who is who, but no real grasp.

So the state of Wayne Rooney's metatarsal, or the talents of Coldplay, or the latest death in Coronation Street grip the public mind while they can barely be bothered to remember who is Home Secretary.

This is a big mistake. Home Secretaries can ruin your life. Political manifestoes are often the only warning you will get of bad things to come, if only people would read them. But Wayne Rooney's foot is really of no interest to anyone but him. Put it like this: Britain can be beaten or outwitted at trade talks or at an EU summit, and everyone in this country will suffer in the end. The 'England' football team can lose all its matches, and it will not have any lasting effect at all on anyone outside that team. The people in Coronation Street and Albert Square don't actually exist.

So pause a moment and ask yourself, have you ever worked out what 'New Labour' is, or have you just swallowed the fashionable version? Everyone is now going on about something called a 'civil war' in the Labour Party. But is it? Most people seem to believe that Mr Blair staged a 'right-wing' putsch in the Labour Party, and that he is himself some sort of Tory. He has followers called 'Blairites' who agree with his plan for Tory-style reform of public services. They are now weak and Mr Blair is, we are told, threatened by the Left.

Mr Blair and his Blairites, we are assured, somehow keep in check the crushed but untamed forces of 'old Labour' which want to nationalise everything from ice-cream vans to any remaining industries we have.

This belief is in fact pure drivel. It does not stand up to a moment's analysis. Yet it is almost universal. First, there was no 'Right-wing' takeover of the Labour Party. Once, long ago, there really were right-wing Labour MPs. Back in 1948, Ernest Bevin and many other cabinet members, along with plenty of Labour backbenchers, voted to retain hanging. Not one of them would now. Hugh Gaitskell denounced anti-nuclear pacifism in 1960, and soon afterwards made the best and most patriotic anti-Common Market speech ever delivered by a British politician. Which of them would now? Roman Catholic Labour MPs fought against abortion on demand. If there is any Labour opposition to this procedure today, it is very hard to spot.

Leathery old working-class street fighters, from Frank Chapple to Terry Duffy, used to grapple with all their might against the Communist fellow-travellers who had penetrated Labour via the trades union movement.

They have almost no equivalents at all today in Labour, which is all but devoid of patriots or moral conservatives. Radical anti-British political correctness is pretty much universal among the so-called 'right-wing' legions of 'Blairite' MPs. And if any of them would own up, you would find a surprising number of Labour MPs and ministers have Communist or Trotskyist backgrounds. They don't talk about this because it still says something important about them.

The Labour right did not just disappear. They were crushed and erased. Right-wing Labour MPs were purged in the 1970s and 1980s by a concerted leftist campaign to deselect them. Organisations now forgotten, such as the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee (to which Mr and Mrs Blair belonged) eradicated conservative attitudes, and people. from the Labour benches.

They were helped by a powerful and tightly organised Communist apparatus in the trades unions. This sinister machine, also now forgotten, went broader, higher and deeper than most people realise. Look up the Trades Union Congress's shifty response to the anti-Communist strikes of Poland's shipyard workers back in 1980, and you will see how bad it was. Britain's official Communist party was always tiny - but that is because Moscow decided in the 1920s that its best militants in Britain should keep their allegiance secret, and work within Labour.

The trouble was that they went too far. The left-wing takeover became so obvious, the bloodshed so noisy, that even the voters noticed. The Left foolishly picked Michael Foot as Labour leader. Foot was a kindly, loveable old bookworm, who had once been a fine public speaker, but was obviously incapable of being Prime Minister. When he was rejected by the voters in 1983, Labour then turned to a younger Foot, the charming but verbose Neil Kinnock.

Kinnock was not half as bright or well--educated as Foot, nor so principled. It is hard, now that he is a retired Euro Commissioner and a Baron, to believe that he was once the darling of the radical left. But many who mistook him for a champion of the Left in those days, now equally wrongly think that he defeated the Left in the Labour Party, because of a single speech in which he attacked something called 'the Militant Tendency'.

This tiny sect, itself a front organisation for an even tinier secret body of fundamentalist Trotskyists called the 'Revolutionary Socialist League’, was the target of obsessive attacks by Labour leaders in the mid-80s. Anyone would have thought that it was a huge and menacing conspiracy, when in fact it had few supporters outside Liverpool, where it had managed to capture an already far left local Labour Party. Its eccentric comrades all seemed to have learned to argue in the same school, where they were taught to jab their fingers rhythmically at their opponents as they harangued them. Even on the left of the Labour Party, they were figures of fun, laughed at for their weird jargon, seemingly translated from late 19th century Russian Bolshevik pamphlets, and their secretive ways.

By denouncing them, Kinnock made it look as if he was taking on a great snarling left-wing dragon. In fact, he was stamping on a hamster, albeit a fierce, ill-tempered hamster. The Communist fellow-travellers and the Bennite armies, who had hunted down right-wing MPs, remained in charge.

I was a political reporter while all this was going on. I had the advantage of being both an ex-Trotskyist, who understood what these groups were like and how tiny they were, and a former member of the Labour Party (I left in 1983), where my support for Britain's nuclear weapons and my condemnations of IRA terrorism had got me into a great deal of trouble. There were Militant supporters in my local party, but they were a tiny few. It was the unshakeable far leftism of the rest that was important. Ken Livingstone, for example, was neither driven out nor defeated by Neil Kinnock and is now one of the most influential politicians in the country.

I also knew quite a bit about the Communist industrial organisation, from my years as a Labour Affairs reporter - where the Communist sympathies of many union officials and activists were taken for granted. These people are mostly still around, as are the campaigners who destroyed Labour's right wing. Why should we imagine that they have changed their aims? They have switched their allegiance from the USSR to political correctness, that's all.

But it was hopeless trying to point out what was really going on. The official story was 'Kinnock takes on Militant', and anything which did not fit in with this conventional wisdom got little space in the papers or from the even more gullible TV political editors. This often happens. The media work as a flock, like sheep, and follow a common line, and so are easily stampeded - as most of them were over the non-existent threat from Iraq. With a few brave exceptions, political journalists in this country are the mouthpieces of their contacts - the politicians themselves.

And this idea, that Kinnock slew the 'Hard Left' and prepared the way for Tory Blair, is the root of the great misunderstanding of New Labour, the fantasy that it has been taken over by the 'right-wing' Blair' who keeps the left from power. New Labour is about image and presentation, and about tactics. But it has never changed its objective It wants a socialist, egalitarian Britain - but through cultural revolution, taxation, education and political correctness rather than through state control of industry. Nationalisation was actually abandoned by Labour in the late 1950s, when it switched to support for comprehensive state schools as its main weapon.

It is just not true that Labour has adopted Tory policies. It has adapted its policies to then times, while hanging on to its basic aims. It is the Tories who have spent the last 50 years stealing Labour's clothes, so that they now support everything they once opposed and have completely abandoned any aims they may once have had. That is the big difference between Labour modernisation - a shift of tactics to gain the same end, and Tory modernisation - a complete change of aims to stay in office without having to fight for their ideas.

That is why they can't think of anything they really dislike about the Blair government, and why they are such a passionless, gutless official opposition. Privatisation of state industry, which everyone goes on about so much, was never a specially Conservative policy. Conservative governments in the past nationalised electricity generation and airlines, and never thought there was anything wrong in the state running the armed forces, the Post Office or the prisons. Who controls is much more important than who owns.

All that is going on in the Labour Party is a series of calculations among Labour MPs, who see politics as a job, over how best to hang on to their seats in the 2009 election. That's a long way off. Remember, the last poll only took place a year ago.

Anthony Blair is not a Tory. He only looks and sounds like one. My own guess is that he has never had any real opinions of any kind. At the age when most people develop political passions, he was trying to become Mick Jagger, singing for a terrible rock band called 'Ugly Rumours'. When I first met him, before he was famous, but when he was just starting his political career, he seemed to be amazingly uninterested in politics or its twin brother, history. No wonder he has drifted off into that playground for self-regarding politicians, foreign policy, where they can pretend to be great statesmen and have lots of free holidays on government money, called 'summits'.

Gordon Brown, a committed and old-fashioned left-wing socialist, has had far more power and influence over 'new' Labour than has Mr Blair. Mr Brown has used the tax system to punish the middle classes on a scale not seen since 1945, and reward Labour supporters. He is the man who decided that the NHS could be cured with trainloads of money and who now has the same mad idea about schools. No policy goes ahead without his approval.

I am told on good authority that he backed the Iraq war in the crucial meetings where his opposition might have kept Britain out. Quite what it is that causes the alleged quarrel between the two men, I am not sure. I am not even certain it really exists. If it does, I suspect it is thanks to Mr Brown's pique over his agreement to let Mr Blair be leader. This was based on the belief that Mr Brown would lose the 1997 election because he looked too dour and socialist. As it turned out, of course, the Tories collapsed so utterly by 1997 that Labour could probably have won with Leon Trotsky as leader.

Mr Brown, who has a real political brain, must also despise the butterfly mind of Mr Blair, and envy the Princess Diana-like magic, which flickers around the Prime Minister. Why does the TV camera love him so? How does he fool so many people into believing that he is brilliant when he isn't? If there really is a rivalry between the two, then this is what fuels it.

But the only 'civil war' in the Labour Party is about power and jobs, not about objects. A 'Blairite' is an ambitious MP who has toadied to Downing Street to become a minister. He or she may well have been a 'Kinnockite' and a 'Smithite' (remember him?) and will have no trouble becoming a 'Brownite' in time, if necessary. The target remains, as always, the same - egalitarian socialism.

The basic anti-British, anti-middle-class, anti-marriage, anti-suburb politics are universal in Labour (and pretty common in the other two parties as well). It really is time that political journalism penetrated the thin disguises in which our leaders advance themselves.

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08 July 2013 1:00 PM

I was amused by the extraordinary resistance which met my story that Margaret Thatcher saved the Labour Party 30 years ago, and was thus responsible for Blair, Brown and Ed Miliband too. Some said Labour would have survived anyway, by some magic power, without any money. Some denounced me (reasonably) for being a promise-breaker, though I think they would have been less censorious if the resulting revelation had been more to to their taste. Others just argued (on the basis of no knowledge of the circumstances, whereas I have total knowledge of them) about whether it was true, or said that the Thatcher union legislation was in fact tough in other areas, which I don't dispute. Or they said that money hadn't saved the Tories from defeat. So what? The truth is that the knowledge that Margaret Thatcher actually saved the Labour Party from oblivion, and is thus responsible for what that party did when it recovered, is profoundly unwelcome to gullible tribalists of both sorts. To accept this as fact is to accept that their fond illusions are just that - fond illusions. Real politics is not what they think it is. Well, diddums.

The story is absolutely true. My source was both extremely well-informed and very well-placed, and I suspected at the time that he or she was faintly disgusted about what had happened. The information was delivered to me and two other journalists over a lunch-table on what are called ‘lobby terms’, that is to say, what is said cannot be attributed directly to its source, but in this case was hedged about with an extra restriction. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not sure, whether the source really wanted us to observe it or not. It certainly can't do her or him any harm for it to be revealed now. It’s an odd thing for a senior politician to tell three journalists something that he or she wants kept secret. But I seem to recall that we all agreed to do so in the discussion that such groups always have after the guest has gone, in which they decide what (if anything) they will write about the encounter. What a collection of gentlemen we were. But were we supposed to be?

Several things persuaded me to break the confidence now. One, that both major figures involved , Margaret Thatcher and Jim Mortimer, have passed away. Two, that the event is now 30 years old, the point at which even Cabinet documents are released. Three, that the chances of the source being identified are virtually non-existent, and it wouldn't hurt her or him if this happened. Four that it has a certain relevance to David Cameron’s frankly absurd attempt to suggest that Labour is uniquely in hock to its donors, which is unjustly winning him golden opinions and praise.

I notice that, as usual, a number of my critics wrote in as if I were defending the Tory Party . People still cannot grasp that it is possible, in British journalism and elsewhere, to be independent of all party machines. I suppose this is because so many journalists are party servants, though increasingly they are the servants of the ‘centre’ consensus, as discussed here a few weeks ago, and will back the Blairite elements of all three parties. The row over the Falkirk selection is actually a quarrel between the Blairites and the Brownites, with Mr Cameron leading the charge on behalf of the Blairites (who, whether in the shape of Blair or Cameron, would take money from almost anyone).

It is amazing how few people can accept the fact that Mr Cameron meant what he said when he declared he was ‘the Heir to Blair’, and was expressing his own true feelings when he ordered his MPs to applaud the Blair creature on his departure from Downing Street. There is one political party in Parliament, and it is not a conservative one. The ‘Conservative’ MPs are, it is true, allowed to play at being conservative from time to time. But it is play, not reality. There was a hilarious moment last week, when Mr Cameron (who for years derided his own party for ‘banging on’ about Europe’) walked into the lobby with his ‘swivel-eyed’ backbenchers in support of an EU referendum, which Mr Cameron has no intention of holding and (unless he has become unhinged) knows very well he will not be in a position to hold after May 2015. As for the alleged ‘repatriation of powers’ on Home Affairs, I think we had better take a long, cool look at that later this week. It is not (how shall I say?),as big as it is being made to seem.

But back to the Labour Party. Perhaps the sharpest comment on my revelation came from Mr David Martin, who wrote : ‘The Trade Union Act 1984, which required trade unions to ballot their members on whether each union should continue to have a political fund, was intended to go further than changing opting out to opting in. To the dismay of Thatcherites, every ballot had a majority in support of political funds. There is no logic in asserting that without financial support from the unions Labour would have suffered political oblivion. Mr Hitchens appears to believe Labour would not have won the general elections of in 1997, 2001 and 2005 without money from the trade unions - but is it not the case that the Tory party has received even bigger donations from its supporters and has not won a general election since 1992?’.

Well, sort of, though I'm not sure about that 'dismay'. Its not that Labour wouldn't have won in 1997, but that it would have efefctively ceased to exist by 1992, if its funding had been cut off as originally planned. Everyone involved knew what a significant measure this was. In 1927, after the defeat of the General Strike, the Tory government passed the Trades Disputes Act which enforced ‘contracting in’ on the political funds of the Labour Party. This was a grave blow to Labour funds, even in the days when most organised working men were keen Labour supporters and actually elected to keep on contributing. The Attlee Government took pains to reverse it in 1947. Laws are only repealed when they are really, really contentious and important in their effect. The wording of the Tory manifesto in 1983 gave Mrs Thatcher a mandate (aftr some talks with the TUC which would almost certainly ahve stalled quite quickly) to re-repeal, and go back to the state of affairs of 1927.

In 1983, with the Labour Party more or less prostrate, and public support for it, even among trade unionists, sagging to dismal levels, I am sure a return to 1927 would have finished Labour for good. I wish it had. Mr Martin perhaps does not recall, as I do , that at this stage the Liberal-SDP Alliance was very close to supplanting Labour. It was my view then, and it is still is now, that the Labour Party should have died a natural death at that stage. In 1980, during the ’Solidarity’ crisis in Poland, the British trade union movement had revealed itself as a nest of apologists for Soviet tyranny, refusing (with a couple of brave exceptions) to support the Gdansk shipyard workers against the Communist authorities. This was because a large number of important unions had been penetrated at very high levels by well-organised Communist and fellow-travelling factions, which ensured that their higher councils and their significant officials were dominated by fellow-travellers or leftist apologists, and that the political power of the unions in the Labour Party (which was considerable) was deployed to help the Left, in domestic and foreign policy. Much of the suicidal behaviour of the unions during this period also only makes sense if it is seen as part of a campaign of national destabilisation. Those taking part probably didn't have a clue they were being used. But I am sure someone was using them.

Because the actual British Commun*ist* Party was always a pygmy (kept alive for years by shopping-bags full of used fivers from the Soviet embassy, handed over at Baron’s Court Tube Station in London and stored in a Golders Green bungalow, details here

people assumed that British Commun*ism* was also insignificant. But in fact, as revealed for instance in Peter Hennessy’s ‘Secret State’, the CP often rejected promising recruits, telling them they could be much more useful if they did not join. We will never know how many such people ended up in high positions in politics, the civil service, journalism, the academy, perhaps even the Church. But, as an industrial and labour correspondent in the 1980s, it was easy for me to see that such people were very influential indeed at the top level of the union movement, not least in its political links with Labour. In those days, Constituency Labour parties were also quite active ( I belonged to one that certainly was) and their activists were more or less indistinguishable from continental Communists in policies and outlook. Having given up revolutionary socialism myself, and having thought I ws joining a social democratic party, I was quite surprised to find that many members of the Labour Party were well to the left of where I had been when I was an International Socialist.

Many of the activists were men and women who, in France or Italy, would have been open Communists. The remannts of 'right wing' Labour, heirs of Bevin and Gaitskell, were the main victims of such people. The constituency Left carefully and successfully targeted socially conservative and patriotic Labour MPs for deselection in a very effective purge. By the time of the Gang of Four breakaway, the old Methodist and socially conservative Labour Party was dead forever. The attempt by people such as William Rodgers to turn it into a version of the German SPD, during the CND rows of the early 1960s, was comprehensively defeated.

(The famous 'Militant Tendency' , I should say here, was wholly irrelevant in the left-wing takeover, an insignificant diversion, whose ostensible 'crushing' was wrongly taken to be the end of hard leftism in the Labour Party by Fleet Street's gullible, ill-informed 'political correspondents').

I think it is absurd that the well-organised and well-directed minority of real hard leftists, in the constituency parties and among CP fellow-travellers in the unions, should have been able to have such influence over British politics, so long after Communism had been utterly discredited (first in its own terms as a liberation movement of the masses - by the Gulag, by the crushing of the East Berlin workers in 1953, of the Hungarian rising in 1956, and of the Prague Spring in 1968; second in general terms as a utopian panacea and alternative economic system, by the disastrous failure of its economies across the Soviet Empire and in Cuba) .

It was only the union political funds which allowed this to continue. Without them, the CP and the hard leftists could have played their games, but they would have had no major party machine to infiltrate and control. A Prime Minister seriously concerned for the country (especially in the days when the USSR still menaced western Europe with its enormous conventional armed forces) would have taken the opportunity, in 1982, to destroy this menace to freedom and prosperity, even at the cost of her own party’s medium and long-term electoral position. I have little doubt that, deprived of the revenues created by the ‘opt-out’ system, the political levy would have shrivelled to a trickle in that period. Labour would have been destroyed by the Alliance in the election of 1988, and thereafter faded into non-existence. The Alliance might well have won in 1988. It’s my guess that, had this happened, British politics might have achieved the reform they so badly need, under which one party speaks more or less, for the views espoused by Polly Toynbee, and the other one speaks, more or less, for the views I hold. With the Alliance as their principal opponent, the Tories would have had to become more socially conservative and more opposed to the expansion of the EU. As it is, the current Tory front bench is rather confusingly dotted with SDP veterans.

A word about the ballots which were eventually held on the political fund. Tragically large numbers of union members don’t vote in most union ballots, even when the issue is quite significant. If they did, the outcomes would be much more conservative. This was proved, in a way, by the active intervention of several Fleet Street newspapers, including the Daily Express (in those days a major force with a big working-class readership), in union ballots in the 1970s and early 1980s. These interventions themselves followed the disclosure of severe ballot-rigging in the old Electrical Trades Union, a scandal partly exposed by traditional ‘right-wing’ Labour supporters disgusted by Communist subversion. By repeatedly and insistently urging their readers to vote for right-wing candidates in union elections, instead of leaving the voting papers to moulder on the mantelpiece, Fleet Street papers tipped the balance in several ballots, most notably in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, as it then was.

Of course several unions didn’t have much in the way of democracy, so it was harder to influence them.

But significantly, I don’t recall there being any co-ordinated or major Fleet Street intervention in the political fund ballots of the late 1980s. This inaction, in my view, ensured that the status quo prevailed, as the Left always had enough organisation and drive to get *their* vote out without alerting opponents to the importance of the poll. Had there been any co-ordinated Fleet Street action by the ‘Tory Press’ (which would have had to have been sanctioned personally by editors) , then I think Labour would have assumed that this was also sanctioned by the government, and considered it a breach of the Thatcher-Mortimer Pact.

I don’t deny that there were several significant pieces of union legislation at the time. How could I? They are not the point. But I have always believed that the general collapse of manufacturing industry (for which I mainly blame the Thatcher government’s bungled economic policy in the early 1980s) was the real reason for the end of the wave of strikes which had been fouling up British industry since the 1960s. The final Scargill miners’ strike was purely political in intention, and actually helped the government destroy coal-mining in this country. Since then the Union movement has been transformed by mergers and contractions, and is now largely a lobby for heavy spending on the public-sector lobby, and a fortress of ‘Equality and Diversity’, not to mention Warmism and sexual liberationism, the modern incarnations of leftist utopianism now that fellow-travellers have nobody to fellow-travel with any more. And the political funds are still there, and operating.

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09 May 2006 1:11 PM

The trouble with free, generally happy countries is that normal people just aren't interested in politics. They know as much about parties and their leaders as I know about football, soap operas or rock music - that is to say they have a vague idea of who is who, but no real grasp.

So the state of Wayne Rooney's metatarsal, or the talents of Coldplay, or the latest death in Coronation Street grip the public mind while they can barely be bothered to remember who is Home Secretary.

This is a big mistake. Home Secretaries can ruin your life. Political manifestoes are often the only warning you will get of bad things to come, if only people would read them. But Wayne Rooney's foot is really of no interest to anyone but him. Put it like this: Britain can be beaten or outwitted at trade talks or at an EU summit, and everyone in this country will suffer in the end. The 'England' football team can lose all its matches, and it will not have any lasting effect at all on anyone outside that team. The people in Coronation Street and Albert Square don't actually exist.

So pause a moment and ask yourself, have you ever worked out what 'New Labour' is, or have you just swallowed the fashionable version? Everyone is now going on about something called a 'civil war' in the Labour Party. But is it? Most people seem to believe that Mr Blair staged a 'right-wing' putsch in the Labour Party, and that he is himself some sort of Tory. He has followers called 'Blairites' who agree with his plan for Tory-style reform of public services. They are now weak and Mr Blair is, we are told, threatened by the Left.

Mr Blair and his Blairites, we are assured, somehow keep in check the crushed but untamed forces of 'old Labour' which want to nationalise everything from ice-cream vans to any remaining industries we have.

This belief is in fact pure drivel. It does not stand up to a moment's analysis. Yet it is almost universal. First, there was no 'Right-wing' takeover of the Labour Party. Once, long ago, there really were right-wing Labour MPs. Back in 1948, Ernest Bevin and many other cabinet members, along with plenty of Labour backbenchers, voted to retain hanging. Not one of them would now. Hugh Gaitskell denounced anti-nuclear pacifism in 1960, and soon afterwards made the best and most patriotic anti-Common Market speech ever delivered by a British politician. Which of them would now? Roman Catholic Labour MPs fought against abortion on demand. If there is any Labour opposition to this procedure today, it is very hard to spot.

Leathery old working-class street fighters, from Frank Chapple to Terry Duffy, used to grapple with all their might against the Communist fellow-travellers who had penetrated Labour via the trades union movement.

They have almost no equivalents at all today in Labour, which is all but devoid of patriots or moral conservatives. Radical anti-British political correctness is pretty much universal among the so-called 'right-wing' legions of 'Blairite' MPs. And if any of them would own up, you would find a surprising number of Labour MPs and ministers have Communist or Trotskyist backgrounds. They don't talk about this because it still says something important about them.

The Labour right did not just disappear. They were crushed and erased. Right-wing Labour MPs were purged in the 1970s and 1980s by a concerted leftist campaign to deselect them. Organisations now forgotten, such as the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee (to which Mr and Mrs Blair belonged) eradicated conservative attitudes, and people. from the Labour benches.

They were helped by a powerful and tightly organised Communist apparatus in the trades unions. This sinister machine, also now forgotten, went broader, higher and deeper than most people realise. Look up the Trades Union Congress's shifty response to the anti-Communist strikes of Poland's shipyard workers back in 1980, and you will see how bad it was. Britain's official Communist party was always tiny - but that is because Moscow decided in the 1920s that its best militants in Britain should keep their allegiance secret, and work within Labour.

The trouble was that they went too far. The left-wing takeover became so obvious, the bloodshed so noisy, that even the voters noticed. The Left foolishly picked Michael Foot as Labour leader. Foot was a kindly, loveable old bookworm, who had once been a fine public speaker, but was obviously incapable of being Prime Minister. When he was rejected by the voters in 1983, Labour then turned to a younger Foot, the charming but verbose Neil Kinnock.

Kinnock was not half as bright or well--educated as Foot, nor so principled. It is hard, now that he is a retired Euro Commissioner and a Baron, to believe that he was once the darling of the radical left. But many who mistook him for a champion of the Left in those days, now equally wrongly think that he defeated the Left in the Labour Party, because of a single speech in which he attacked something called 'the Militant Tendency'.

This tiny sect, itself a front organisation for an even tinier secret body of fundamentalist Trotskyists called the 'Revolutionary Socialist League’, was the target of obsessive attacks by Labour leaders in the mid-80s. Anyone would have thought that it was a huge and menacing conspiracy, when in fact it had few supporters outside Liverpool, where it had managed to capture an already far left local Labour Party. Its eccentric comrades all seemed to have learned to argue in the same school, where they were taught to jab their fingers rhythmically at their opponents as they harangued them. Even on the left of the Labour Party, they were figures of fun, laughed at for their weird jargon, seemingly translated from late 19th century Russian Bolshevik pamphlets, and their secretive ways.

By denouncing them, Kinnock made it look as if he was taking on a great snarling left-wing dragon. In fact, he was stamping on a hamster, albeit a fierce, ill-tempered hamster. The Communist fellow-travellers and the Bennite armies, who had hunted down right-wing MPs, remained in charge.

I was a political reporter while all this was going on. I had the advantage of being both an ex-Trotskyist, who understood what these groups were like and how tiny they were, and a former member of the Labour Party (I left in 1983), where my support for Britain's nuclear weapons and my condemnations of IRA terrorism had got me into a great deal of trouble. There were Militant supporters in my local party, but they were a tiny few. It was the unshakeable far leftism of the rest that was important. Ken Livingstone, for example, was neither driven out nor defeated by Neil Kinnock and is now one of the most influential politicians in the country.

I also knew quite a bit about the Communist industrial organisation, from my years as a Labour Affairs reporter - where the Communist sympathies of many union officials and activists were taken for granted. These people are mostly still around, as are the campaigners who destroyed Labour's right wing. Why should we imagine that they have changed their aims? They have switched their allegiance from the USSR to political correctness, that's all.

But it was hopeless trying to point out what was really going on. The official story was 'Kinnock takes on Militant', and anything which did not fit in with this conventional wisdom got little space in the papers or from the even more gullible TV political editors. This often happens. The media work as a flock, like sheep, and follow a common line, and so are easily stampeded - as most of them were over the non-existent threat from Iraq. With a few brave exceptions, political journalists in this country are the mouthpieces of their contacts - the politicians themselves.

And this idea, that Kinnock slew the 'Hard Left' and prepared the way for Tory Blair, is the root of the great misunderstanding of New Labour, the fantasy that it has been taken over by the 'right-wing' Blair' who keeps the left from power. New Labour is about image and presentation, and about tactics. But it has never changed its objective It wants a socialist, egalitarian Britain - but through cultural revolution, taxation, education and political correctness rather than through state control of industry. Nationalisation was actually abandoned by Labour in the late 1950s, when it switched to support for comprehensive state schools as its main weapon.

It is just not true that Labour has adopted Tory policies. It has adapted its policies to then times, while hanging on to its basic aims. It is the Tories who have spent the last 50 years stealing Labour's clothes, so that they now support everything they once opposed and have completely abandoned any aims they may once have had. That is the big difference between Labour modernisation - a shift of tactics to gain the same end, and Tory modernisation - a complete change of aims to stay in office without having to fight for their ideas.

That is why they can't think of anything they really dislike about the Blair government, and why they are such a passionless, gutless official opposition. Privatisation of state industry, which everyone goes on about so much, was never a specially Conservative policy. Conservative governments in the past nationalised electricity generation and airlines, and never thought there was anything wrong in the state running the armed forces, the Post Office or the prisons. Who controls is much more important than who owns.

All that is going on in the Labour Party is a series of calculations among Labour MPs, who see politics as a job, over how best to hang on to their seats in the 2009 election. That's a long way off. Remember, the last poll only took place a year ago.

Anthony Blair is not a Tory. He only looks and sounds like one. My own guess is that he has never had any real opinions of any kind. At the age when most people develop political passions, he was trying to become Mick Jagger, singing for a terrible rock band called 'Ugly Rumours'. When I first met him, before he was famous, but when he was just starting his political career, he seemed to be amazingly uninterested in politics or its twin brother, history. No wonder he has drifted off into that playground for self-regarding politicians, foreign policy, where they can pretend to be great statesmen and have lots of free holidays on government money, called 'summits'.

Gordon Brown, a committed and old-fashioned left-wing socialist, has had far more power and influence over 'new' Labour than has Mr Blair. Mr Brown has used the tax system to punish the middle classes on a scale not seen since 1945, and reward Labour supporters. He is the man who decided that the NHS could be cured with trainloads of money and who now has the same mad idea about schools. No policy goes ahead without his approval.

I am told on good authority that he backed the Iraq war in the crucial meetings where his opposition might have kept Britain out. Quite what it is that causes the alleged quarrel between the two men, I am not sure. I am not even certain it really exists. If it does, I suspect it is thanks to Mr Brown's pique over his agreement to let Mr Blair be leader. This was based on the belief that Mr Brown would lose the 1997 election because he looked too dour and socialist. As it turned out, of course, the Tories collapsed so utterly by 1997 that Labour could probably have won with Leon Trotsky as leader.

Mr Brown, who has a real political brain, must also despise the butterfly mind of Mr Blair, and envy the Princess Diana-like magic, which flickers around the Prime Minister. Why does the TV camera love him so? How does he fool so many people into believing that he is brilliant when he isn't? If there really is a rivalry between the two, then this is what fuels it.

But the only 'civil war' in the Labour Party is about power and jobs, not about objects. A 'Blairite' is an ambitious MP who has toadied to Downing Street to become a minister. He or she may well have been a 'Kinnockite' and a 'Smithite' (remember him?) and will have no trouble becoming a 'Brownite' in time, if necessary. The target remains, as always, the same - egalitarian socialism.

The basic anti-British, anti-middle-class, anti-marriage, anti-suburb politics are universal in Labour (and pretty common in the other two parties as well). It really is time that political journalism penetrated the thin disguises in which our leaders advance themselves.